Chapter 17: Eleven Years Later

At twenty-nine I was a third-year resident in the emergency department of a Minneapolis hospital, and I had a rule about Thursdays.

On Thursdays I took my break in the staff stairwell, with my phone and a yogurt.

I did not go near the main lobby.

The rule was eleven months old.

That was when my parents moved to an apartment eight blocks from my building and began sending letters to the hospital's front desk.

The hospital security office had a folder for them.

The week the first one arrived, I went down and wrote two names on the no-entry list myself.

The guard on the day desk was a big, quiet man who had worked there for twenty years.

He held the line for me without being asked to say why.

My phone buzzed on the step beside me.

It was Faye.

She was twenty-eight now, an art therapist at a children's clinic across the river, and every Thursday at this time she sent me the family weather.

Grandpa's tomatoes are dying. He blames the neighbor's dog.

Mabel hired a clerk and fired him by lunch. She says he alphabetized by color.

Mabel was eighty-two and still ran the shop four days a week.

Are you eating or just standing in a stairwell?

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